


Better

by Umbralpilot



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Not really h/c, Post obligatory Reaper retrieval or something, Reaper and ANGRY ANGST, Winston and difficult questions, maybe a little?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 14:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8671690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: Winston and Reaper. The power of the family.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Headcanon: Winston, despite gene therapy and being brought up by humans, still struggles with human social cues. 
> 
> Also: Winston is perfect.

Winston sees Gabriel Reyes’s face for the first time three weeks after the retrieval.

One AM. He is sitting in the rec room in his custom-built easy chair, nursing a tablet loaded with _Cosmos_ reruns, the third jar of peanut butter, and a broken leg that Mercy had insisted he let rest and heal naturally for a while, when the door swings open and gives him a minor heart attack. The Gibraltar Watchpoint is silent and empty, all of its old-new residents on missions except two, and he knows Hana is still in her room because he hears the occasional maniacal laugh drifting over from therein. Winston’s almost forgotten about Reaper’s still-fresh presence. It’s realising as much that gives him half that heart attack. The other half is just: _Reaper._

Shuffling in, in a black hoodie, black slacks, potentially magical black socks that let a man his size creep about catlike in almost total silence. Winston still wonders if Soldier: 76 was entirely on point in his choice for the ex-Talon's borrowed wardrobe, but he isn’t about to be the one to make that suggestion. Fashion has never been his forte. And the mask, of course, always the mask.

Angela claimed that Reaper wore it for spite. A threat, a reminder, he is not the man they are trying so hard to see when they look at him. He is in their home now - half prisoner, half patient, all bad memories - but he is not with them. If there is something Winston has learned in three weeks of observing Reaper from a safe distance, it’s that he’s nothing if not spiteful.

Winston fixes his glasses on his nose. There’s not a lot of room for safe distance in the rec room. He gives a faint grunt and settles a little deeper into his easy chair. Polite hostility is one of the easiest human expressions for a gorilla to emulate.

Reaper pads over to the couch - the closest piece of furniture to the door, and uncomfortably near - and drops down into it. Slouches where he sits. He unhooks one black-gloved hand from the pouch of the hoodie, reaches up, and pulls off his mask.

He leans back, closes his eyes, and blows a long, smoky trail of blackness out towards the ceiling.

If he meant to somehow distract Winston from telling him off about it, the scientist thinks, he’s done a stellar job. But then, Gabriel Reyes has never done less.

Reaper doesn’t look quite like Reyes yet, but he’s making progress on looking human. His face isn’t missing chunks, for once, and his skin doesn’t visibly slough off into smoke. Looking at him is still like looking through a faint haze - bad light - the essence of his own body clouding and occluding him, scattering the faint red glow of his eyes. His hair and beard are surprisingly neat. The scientist in Winston, which is most of Winston, notes with satisfaction that Mercy’s and Lúcio’s technique seems to be taking, It’s the young DJ who’s made it possible, the man who, with his promise of healing, still guarantees Reaper’s spiteful cooperation. The new Overwatch’s brightest star, Winston doesn’t understand irony much of the time, but he understands this one.

He doesn’t understand it enough not to speak up, though, because he is terrible with silence and the technique really is exciting from a biological point of view and he always wants to share exciting things. “Oh. It looks like Lúcio was - “

Reaper cups both hands over his lower face and breaks into a horrible hacking cough.

Winston’s alarm is sharp, sudden, tangy like fear. He twists flinching in his easy chair and is relieved it’s designed not to snap under the gesture. He’s heard those fits before, knows it’s this overt sign of his body’s disintegration that’s driven the mercenary back to the house of his now-enemies. He just had no idea they were bad enough to make Reaper take off the mask.

There’s a box of tissues on the coffee table. A staple of a happy home where young soft-hearted heroes and the occasional too-old-for-it hero gather to watch Disney films. It’s just close enough for Winston to reach with the toes of his good leg. Why he does so, carefully sliding it over in Reaper’s direction, is a scientific riddle for the ages.

Reaper takes it.

He doesn’t seem to have much of a choice, except to hack up black bile all over the floor, and he’s apparently not _that_ spiteful, somehow. Winston clears his throat and pointedly looks away. He doesn’t enjoy looking at anyone suffer. He sneaks a long arm to the trashcan on his side of the coffee table, passes it to Reaper’s side, and focuses on Neil deGrasse Tyson while waiting for the bad noises to stop.

He lasts thirty six seconds in the ensuing heavy silence before he asks, “do you want anything for that?”

He only halfway looks up from the tablet. If he isn’t careful he might meet Reaper’s eyes, and there are things a gorilla shouldn’t do with a person he’s twitchy around if he knows what’s good for both of them. Reaper does look directly at him, eyes sunken, hand still half-dragged over his mouth. He’s drawn and miserable and _hating_.

“Taking your turn playing doctor?” he rasps.

Winston fixes his glasses on his nose. “Well. Uh. Strictly speaking, my doctorate is in physics. But it doesn’t take a great scientific mind to prescribe some dextromethorphan - “

\- sarcasm. Right. He wilts at Reaper’s gaze. _That_ is a Reyes look, all right.

“Cough syrup for a dead man.” Reaper shows his teeth in the snarl. “Good plan, monkey.”

Winston feels the fur on his back rise, draws himself up, straightens as much as he can in his easy chair. It is generally a bad idea to show teeth around him. Anyone who knows him should know that. Reyes knew him, knew him young, much less well-adjusted, much more volatile. He sighs, sinks himself back again.

This is why he’s so unhappy with this arrangement. It was hard enough adjusting to the new ways Soldier: 76 uses Jack Morrison’s codes. Reaper is definitely - Winston tries not to be crude - he could use another word, but - Reaper is definitely fucking with him.

Sometimes Winston finds it exhausting to be quite so frequently fucked with.

“Taxonomically speaking, a gorilla is an ape. Family hominidae.” He does love to share this fact. He remembers being thrilled when he learned it. “And prescribing cough syrup would allow us to observe how your altered system is responding to conventional treatment. This could be valuable data.”

Reaper makes a disgusted noise. “What if I’m _tired_ of being your source of ‘valuable data’?”

Winston tilts his head. “Well, I sympathise with that, I really do - “

“Ain’t that a comfort. Sympathy from the circus freak.”

A small fire rouses into life in Winston’s chest, and a warning bulb lights in his head.

“I am a member of Overwatch,” he says with quiet clarity. “And you are in _my_ circus now.”

Reaper actually pauses. Stares. Something unguarded flickers across his face, an emotion too quick for Winston to catch. What Winston does catch is that in that moment he’d apparently forgotten that his mask isn’t on.

He grabs for it, but it’s only halfway to his face when he starts coughing again, worse this time if anything. Winston really can’t stand listening to it and not doing something. He hobbles up from his easy chair, limping on three knuckles towards the door. “Let me see about that cough syrup. You know,” he throws over his shoulder, “you can tell Angela and Lúcio when you have a bad day. I’m sure they’d be happy to - “

Oh. That look again. He’s missed something again. Reaper doesn’t want to tell Mercy or Lúcio. He’s only showed up here, mask off, when everyone else is gone. He’s - _think, you large hominidae brain, think -_

Wait. That’s the point, isn’t it? The penny drops, and his voice with it. “Or not, if they’re all too complicated for you to deal with. I get it.”

“Just get me the damn medicine,” Reaper grunts, mask still off, face in his hands.

Winston has never in his life hesitated before helping anyone. He is not about to let Reaper get him to start now, he decides. Gabriel Reyes would not have approved if he did.

Rummaging through the nearest medicine cabinet (they have a lot; half the time someone in the Watchpoint is in need of painkillers), he does the same through his memories of the Blackwatch commander. Not much and too much all at once. A gruff, professional man. Burned by the Omnic Crisis and never really trusting anything and anyone not human. Winston mostly remembers avoiding him, trailing behind Commander Morrison and trying not to feel the eyes in the back of his head.

 _You take in your strays, Gabe,_ the commander would say. _I take mine._

He returns to the rec room. Reaper is still unmasked. Winston sets the bottle on the table and ambles into his easy chair while Reaper takes it, uncaps it, pours a dose of medicine into the cap. It’s a strange sight that invites staring, but Winston is inured to strangeness and has been stared at enough in his life. He sneaks a glance just in time to see Reaper making a face at the taste of the syrup. This time he lasts forty nine whole seconds of awkward silence. He’s improving.

“If you’re having trouble thanking me, I’d take an apology about the glasses instead.” That can pass as a joke, right? Sometimes it’s exhausting to never really be sure how these things work. Reaper gives him the wilting look again. He’s not there for jokes or thanks. He’s there for… what? Why has he taken his mask off for Winston of all people?

Simple Winston. Cheerful, awkward Winston, gorilla and nerd. Who has never had anything in his life except Overwatch. Unerring believer in the power of that family.

Well, isn’t he?

“You’re welcome,” he pushes on bravely, despite feeling like the red glow of the glare is just turning harder. “Ask again anytime. It’s my job to look after you all. After all, as the expression goes,” he smiles beatifically through a mawful of gorilla teeth, “if this is my circus, then you are my monkeys.”

Reaper actually snorts at that. Perhaps the joke worked after all.

He leans forward. Leans very clearly into Winston’s careful distance.

“Think you can do Morrison’s job?”

Winston stubbornly gives his stock response. “Someone has to.”

Reaper’s mouth twists. Threat? Amusement? “And mine?”

“I - “ Winston’s voice fails him. He struggles not to grunt or huff his nervousness. _Blackwatch._ It makes him ashamed to admit he’s been trying not to think about it, even after the recall, as if the split, the accusations, the Fall could be undone by his denial, his simple reassurances to himself. Reaper keeps leaning closer, deliberately closer; his scent and his voice are wrong and Winston got a lot of mileage out of that, dissociating. But he’s much too close now, and it is too clearly Gabriel Reyes’s face staring at him from under the hood, asking him what he’s got to say to it. “We’ll -”

“ _We._ Hah. I like that. Who do you think going to do it with you?”

 _I am a member of Overwatch._ Winston would like to get angry about now. It isn’t working. “If the world needs us to -“

“Still trying to play hero,” Reaper drawls in his broken voice. “Did you have any kind of plan for your recall, or did you just think you can solve any problem together, once you had your little family reunion?”

Was it about the world? Or was it about his family?

“Your family is dead.” The face retreats. Reaper gathers himself back into his own shadows. He sinks lower into the couch, still snapping off the words, but staring into the distance. He doesn’t smell like the man they want him to be. He smells of black smoke and pain. “Your _family_ made me into this wreck. And you think you can fix anything?”

It’s probably a rhetorical question. Winston has always been bad with those.

He chooses not to understand it.

“We are making progress fixing you,” he says quietly.

Reaper’s eyes shoot his way again, sharp, stabbing, gutting. But there’s not much he can say to that, Winston thinks with scientific confidence. It’s a fact. His own face, almost whole again, is evidence of it.

“Learning from past mistakes is the essence of progress. As long as we admit to them, and acknowledge the consequences…” have they acknowledged the consequences? Has he? “Very few things go right the first time. I should know.” He more than anyone. If he means to look them in the eye, his family. Jack, Ana, Reinhardt, Lena… Reyes. “We - we try until we do better. Until the world is what it could be.”

His voice trails off again, momentum fading. _Simple Winston_. It takes all his considerable gorilla strength not to lower his head.

It’s Reaper who looks away first.

He crosses his arms, drops his chin down on his chest, closes his eyes. Breathes out a plume of blackness again.

“ _No es mi circo,_ ” he mutters, “ _no son mis monos._ ”

His voice is odd, like he’s testing the words. Like the idea that this is not his to do, that he can let go of it is a foreign one. Why, Winston can’t guess. But he brightens.

“Absolutely,” he answers. “It’s our turn now.”

Reaper responds with a grunt - dubious - and yet not hostile. Winston notices, but does not point out that he’s stopped coughing. And may be drooping a bit, even in his pose of curled up guardedness. The scientific part of Winston, which is Winston’s favourite part, makes an observation: Reaper’s altered system is responding to cough syrup with remarkable speed and efficiency, though with slightly heavier side effects than expected.

He has also left his mask off.

Winston waits. He may be holding his breath. He reaches a stunning record of a hundred and fifty five seconds without running his mouth off. Reaper doesn’t speak again. His breathing evens out. The tight hurting tension eases from his face until he looks ten years younger. Almost familiar, this way.

Winston swallows. Pain thrums in his own leg. He looks down at his tablet, and back up at that face. “I’ll do better,” he tells it. “We’ll do better.”

Reyes doesn’t answer. But that's inevitable, Winston thinks. It’s on them to find the answers now.


End file.
